You know the drill. Little girl’s father flushes her pet alligator down the toilet. It grows to incredible size and starts eating people. It’s even more familiar territory when you recognize that this is Jaws with thick scaly skin and yellow eyes. We also get that familiar addition, the company conducting illegal research which has […]
Read more "Alligator (1980)"In case you are wondering, the answer is “yes”: I did decide to re-watch this one (after many, many years) because I had just watched the other giant-robots-battling-each-other movie from 1989, Ganheddo [Gunhed]. Now back to our regularly scheduled review. This was Empire Films’ greatest effort. Not that they were actually the ones who released it. […]
Read more "Robot Jox (1989)"The short version: I absolutely love this film! This is a beautiful and wacky SF comedy, one of the best ever to come out of Czechoslovakia. It is light-hearted yet pointedly satiric and keeps the audience laughing the whole way through. It is amazing. You really should watch this one. Even though you’ll have to […]
Read more "Srdecný pozdrav ze zemekoule [Hearty Greetings from the Globe] (1983)"It’s amazing how well this film has held up. Computer animation was the latest movie making toy back in the early Eighties, but no one believed that you could ever achieve realism with it. Someone famously said that they might be able to animate people — but only if they were bald and naked. Not […]
Read more "The Last Starfighter (1984)"There have been quite a few interesting genre films coming out of Korea over the last decade or so, including a few truly incredible films like The Host [Gwoemul] and the wacky revisionist Western, The Good, the Bad and The Weird. While they often borrow a bit from Western or Japanese film, they do so with a […]
Read more "Manyeo [The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion] (2018)"You’ve probably misunderstood the title of this film. In this case, “Creatures” refers not to the typical Hollywood monster we’d expect in a film called “The Creatures,” but instead might better be translated as “creations.” Although that really doesn’t convey the sense that’s here as well: “creature” as something one controls, like a slave. One […]
Read more "Les créatures [The Creatures] (1966)"Back in 1977, a group of young special effects artists got together to make a science fiction film, Planet of Dinosaurs. Now this is one of those films you can’t watch with any illusions: they didn’t have much cash, their no-name cast isn’t particularly good, the script is just as bad, and there’s a lot of […]
Read more "Planet of Dinosaurs (1977)"James Cameron once described Gunhed as one of his favorite B-Movies. I have to agree with that assessment. Yeah, I know a lot of people out there have called this one terrible, or claim that they can’t understand the plot. Frankly, that puzzles me, as it seems to be a mostly straightforward sort of affair: […]
Read more "Ganheddo [Gunhed] (1989)"It was one of those incredible, all too rare mountaintop moments: I got to show my nephews The Wrath of Khan for the first time. Khan is without question the best Star Trek movie ever made — and that probably will ever be made — whether old crew, Next Generation or Kelvin Timeline. It is […]
Read more "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)"“Realism is a form of hypocrisy. We are telling stories that take place in simulated worlds. Genre films like scifi, fantasy or horror are just more honest about that.” “I wanted to make A LIVING DOG not only because I love genre films and independent films but also because I admire silent movies and the […]
Read more "A Living Dog (2019)"
rivets on the poster 